Established model
Personas
Alan Cooper · 1998
A small number of specific, named, fictional people standing in for real patterns of behaviour.
Its place in the frameworkMarket Core›Target Audience
What it does
Introduced in software design to stop teams building for an elastic user who conveniently wants whatever is easiest to build. The mechanism is specificity: a named person with a particular situation and a particular constraint cannot be quietly redefined mid-argument, and that is the entire benefit.
- Reach for it when
- When design or marketing decisions are being settled by whoever imagines the user most confidently.
- Where it stops
- Invented rather than researched, a persona is only a projection of the team, and demographic detail added for colour invites reasoning from stereotype.
Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Sams, 1998.
Why it sits at Target Audience
Who the organisation is actually trying to reach: how they divide, what they are worth, and where they can be found.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- SegmentationThe segmentation–targeting–positioning sequence, and the criteria that a segment be measurable, substantial, accessible and actionable.
- The profileBuyer-persona research practice, and the critique of internally generated personas as projections of the team.
- Segment valueCustomer lifetime value against acquisition cost, applied at segment rather than aggregate level.
- Where they areMedia and channel research on reach and accessibility as a segmentation criterion in its own right.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Target Audience lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Business CoreWhat the audience is trying to get done is analysed in the value proposition; this object settles who and where.
- Brand CorePositioning is aimed at a segment, and a position for everyone is aimed at nobody.
- Marketing ChannelsWhere the audience is determines which channels are even available.
- Data CoreSegment value requires the acquisition and retention data to be held at segment level.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Target Audience too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- Segmentation, targeting, positioningDivide the market, choose deliberately which parts to serve, then decide what you will mean to them.
Elsewhere in Market Core
- PESTEL analysis
- SWOT analysis
- TAM, SAM and SOM
- The five forces
- Strategic group mapping
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- AIDA
- The consumer decision journey
- See, think, do, care
- The marketing mix
- Marketing mix modelling
- The content marketing matrix
- STEPPS
- The 70:20:10 content mix
- Distribution intensity
- SPIN selling
- The product life cycle
- Disruptive innovation
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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